Students Assigned to Write Wikipedia Articles

openfrog writes "An inspired professor at University of Washington-Bothell, Martha Groom, made an interesting pedagogical experiment. Instead of vilifying Wikipedia as some academics are prone to do, she assigned the students enrolled in her environmental history course to contribute articles. The result has proven "transformative" to her students. They were no longer spending their time writing for one reader, says Groom, but were doing work of consequence in a "peer reviewed" environment, which enhanced the quality of their output."

Comments

Re:Makes perfect sense

[jadeforrest]

My wife, a research librarian, attended a conference last week where Professor Groom presented on this topic. What she found interesting were a couple of points:

• The students thought the assignments were more meaningful because they weren't just thrown away at the end of the assignment.

• The fact that assignments were written for the public instead of just one professor gave a whole other level of meaning to the assignments, and meant that they were getting another level of feedback. It is a touch of what peer-review is like.

• Selecting the assignments was often very difficult, because by the time the article had been written, the article would have already been filled in. Also, a lot of topics are already taken.

• She taught some classes where she allowed them to fill in already existing articles, and some where they had to come up with something new entirely.

• She had to prepare them when there were controversial topics, and in one case she actually had to intervene because people were being so rude to a student (I guess the student was also new to wikis). There was a fair amount of orientation into the wiki community.

• She partnered with a technical person during the project. I think it might have been his idea actually.

• Some students had lasting connections with their topics even after the assignments finished. One student was written by a researcher in the field he or she had written the article about, praising them for doing such a thorough, well-written article. That type of validation is hard to get from conventional articles.

• Students generally thought writing a wiki article would be easy, but were not very well prepared for doing so. Writing a well-researched, well-documented summary is very different than typical persuasive essays.

• Original research doesn't belong on Wikipedia unless it's published elsewhere first.

• Grading seems like it would be very difficult. How do you account for what the student contributes, and what other people contribute. Also, how would the student write the article over a course of a few weeks, incrementally, or all at once, and what kind of version control issues would ensue?

So imagine if more schools did this. What would Wikipedia look like then? Any different? It seems like it would encourage a lot more citations if nothing else. It also seems like you would reach a point where it gets increasingly difficult to find a topic that's not incredibly obscure. And then it would be exactly like academia today :)

Re:Doublt benefit..

[Domstersch]

Guess what? Academics are often "MANDATED" to "(not just submit, but) actually publish articles" in peer-reviewed journals, or at least publish their findings in other area-specific literature (perhaps books, etc.). Is that an "indication of arrogance and incompetence" on the part of the university/college that employs them? Hell no - it's a condition of their employment that they produce a quantity of quality writing and original research. Or, to look at it another way, it's what academics do.

Such writing is often under time pressure - that doesn't mean it ends up being plagiarized, or a pack of lies, or 'just' journalism as you imply.

One reason this project works - one reason it's a good exercise to put students through - is that it forces them to synthesize their knowledge on a subject and practice writing in a vigorous, academic style, with the benefits of peer-review, but without the pressure of formal publication.

Articles created by the students

[utkarshraj]

This is not the first assignment of its type. There have been more than 40 such projects; there are at least 10 more in progress. The students and the professors need to be aware of the "No original research" policy. Many university-level assignments involve original research, and Wikipedia is not the right place for publishing original research.

Here are some of the articles created as a part of the assignments we're talking about:

• Deforestation during the Roman period
• Americanization (of Native Americans)
• 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus
• Communal Wildlife Conservancies in Namibia
• Akosombo Dam
• Renewable energy in Africa